Mama Chi

Delia Bejerano de Atencio, known by her Ngäbere name Besikö Kruningrobu and by the title Mama Chi ('Little Mother'), was a young Ngäbe woman of the Tabasará region of western Panama who, on 22 September 1962 at Krunbiti near Boca de Balsa, reported a vision of two celestial visitors who charged her with reforming Ngäbe life. The religion that grew from her preaching, called Mama Chi or Mama Tatda ('Mother-Father'), centred worship on Ngöbö, prohibited alcohol and the balsería and chichería festivals, discouraged contact with outsiders, instituted regular prayer meetings, and prophesied destruction if its precepts were ignored and prosperity if they were kept. The movement swept the Ngäbe area in the 1960s, drew many sukias (shamans) into its priesthood, and is credited by ethnographers with beginning the political mobilization that led to the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca. Mama Chi died of a fever on 14 September 1964, aged twenty-three; leadership of the still-continuing religion later passed to others, including her daughter Emilce Atencio.

Domains

• prophecy
• moral law

Powers

• to receive visions of divine beings
• to foretell doom or good fortune for her people according to their conduct

Epithets

• Mama Chi

Relations

• subordinate to: Ngöbö

Sources

• Françoise Guionneau-Sinclair, Movimiento profético e innovación política entre los ngobe (guaymí) de Panamá: 1962-1984 (Panamá: Universidad de Panamá, 1987)
• Philip D. Young, Ngawbe: Tradition and Change Among the Western Guaymí of Panama (Illinois Studies in Anthropology 7; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971)
• Philip D. Young, 'Ngawbe', in James W. Dow (ed.), Encyclopedia of World Cultures, vol. 8: Middle America and the Caribbean (Boston: G. K. Hall / Macmillan, 1995)